Remembering the Old Songs:

The Lonesome Valley (The Two Cruel Brothers: Laws M32)

by Lyle Lofgren

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, October 1998)

This month, we're heading back to an old ballad, although from a
slightly
different direction. Any of us who took a college English Literature
course
a few decades ago learned about the "Classic Ballads" and their
poetic importance. Just go to your Used Book Store, buy an out-of-print
poetry textbook, open it to page fourteen, and you'll know what I mean.
Those "poems" were all British, non-copyrighted, and cribbed from
the Francis James Child collection of English and Scottish Popular
Ballads.
If you've been following this series, you already know quite a bit
about
them. After reading and singing a number of these ballads, particularly
in the American versions, you get sensitized to a certain kind of
poetry
that's intensified by both simplicity and compression. I recognized the
intensity of The Lonesome Valley the first time I heard it,
on a recording made by John and Alan Lomax in Austin, TX, in 1936
(Library
of Congress Archive of American Folksong #648B). The singers were the
Gant
Family, parents and children, originally from Tennessee, temporarily in
Texas, and John, in his memoirs, didn't mention much about them. That's
strange, because they knew some of the most interesting songs he ever
collected.
If I live long enough, this series will include a dozen Gant Family
songs.

This ballad, although not in Child's book, was commonly collected in
Britain and the U.S. (mostly in inferior versions) as The Bramble
(or Bamboo) Briars, The Jealous Brothers, or The
Lonesome Valley. Scholars have pointed out that a similar story
exists
concisely in Giovanni Boccaccio's Tales of the Decameron
(fourth
day, fifth story) and (as an acknowledged ripoff poem) in John Keat's
long-windedly
Isabella, or The Pot of Basil. Well, I hate to be disagreeable
with scholars, but those stories are not kin to this one. In those
versions,
the sister finds the lover's grave (via a dream), cuts off his head,
brings
it back, and plants it in a pot as basil fertilizer. The brothers steal
the pot, and the sister dies of sorrow. Notice that, in the Gants'
version,
the sister takes control of the situation, and does not fade away. If
this
is a composed ballad, it was written by a more talented (or at least
more
modern) poet than Keats.

As you might surmise, I have no idea where the Gants got this
ballad.
I also don't know where they or their descendants are (some of them
sound
very young on the recording, and could be still alive). To the best of
my
knowledge, the only public performance of this version was by The
Masked
Folksinger, unaccompanied, on a Prairie Home Companion program years
ago.
After the show, he walked out the Stage Door, into the night. Maybe we
can
bring him back by singing this song, even if we need the crutch of a
guitar
accompaniment. It's worth a try.

Accompaniment Note: This song can end on either a G
or a D chord. A D chord leaves a suspended feel; G sounds more like a
conclusion.
Your choice....

Complete Lyrics:

One night a couple, they sat courting,
Two brothers chanced to overhear;
Saying, "This courtship, it must be ended,
We'll force him headlong to his grave."

Her brothers rose early the very next morning,
A game of hunting for to go;
And of this man they both insisted
That along with them that he must go.

They rambled over the hills and mountains
And to many a place where they were unknown,
Until they came to a lonesome valley
And there they left him dead alone.

And when her brothers had return-ed
Their sister inquired for the chosen man;
"We've lost him in our game of hunting,
We lost him in a foreign land."

The sister rose early the very next morning
She dressed herself to go away;
Her brothers asked her where she's going,
Not a word to them that she would say.

She rambled over the hills and mountains
And to many a place where she were unknown,
Until she came to the lonesome valley
And there she found him dead alone.

His red rosy cheeks, they were all faded;
His lips were salt as any brine;
She kissed him over and over, crying,
Says, "my darling bosom friend of mine."

And when the sister had return-ed
Her brothers asked her where she'd been;
"O, hush your tongues, you deceitful villians,*
For the one you killed, you both shall hang."

And so her brothers were arrested,
And forced across the rousing sea;
There come a storm and the wind did drown them,
Their bloody grave lies in the deep.

* pronounced "vill-yuns."

Bibliography

This song is Laws M32, The Bramble Briar (The Merchant's
Daughter;
In Bruton Town). Laws lists nineteen American versions (from
Arkansas,
Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee,
Texas, and Virginia) plus four English texts and a broadside. In
addition,
he cites a 1918 article by H. M. Belden, "Boccaccio, Hans Sachs, and
The Bramble Briar." (Sachs published a verse recounting of this
story or something similar to it in the sixteenth century. Many
recordings
are known.

Laws evidently regards this as derived from a broadside ancestor;
given,
however, that only one broadside version is known (and that one
obscure),
it seems likely enough that it originated in tradition.